I just had an interesting conversation with Scott Karp over at his [1] Publishing 2.0 site regarding the role of Google, niche sites trying to get noticed and how they feed Google’s profits.

Why post all of my thoughts there, though, when I have a perfectly good place here that will actually keep my thoughts more visible for a longer period of time? So here goes.

Scott Karp has a gripe with the future ability of ad revenue to support the news media. Browse his site and see for yourself. There’s lots of good content there and I link to it regularly below.

But I don’t agree with him all of the time, and the biggest area is this obsession he has with predicting the demise of ad dollars as a vehicle for supporting the future of the news media.

Part of his view as best as I can quickly and perhaps imperfectly condense it seems to be that the proliferation of sites all competing for the same ad dollars means most sites will lose the ability to attract enough money to be successful. Meanwhile megasites such as Google survives easily on the billions in profits it gets off the backs of the struggling little sites across the Internet.

This may be true to a degree, and it is not at all clear he is limiting his views to media sites. I am sure he is not.

But as his focus is often media-related and he seems to share this concern for a likely ad revenue shortfall for media as well, I’d like to focus on the media in particular and examine this view. There is also a lot of insight to be gained from considering the role of Google.

Take Google’s role on this site, which strives to be a news site for a variety of design topics. Most of our ad dollars probably stem from Google ads, which seem to be automatically generated and targeted in a topic-specific way here.

I look at this arrangement and see a beautiful convergence of needs and interests. We do not have to worry about editorial independence when we seem to have little if any control over the ads that appear on our site. (Pariah, if you wander in, please correct any misconceptions I have about our site if you see the need.)

Google not only drives our site traffic, it helps pay the bills to keep it running. And we can be as independent as possible. In return Google gets a share of our ad revenue.

Where’s the harm here?

I think one of the big challenges for news sites is finding ways to target their advertising to related content while maintaining their independence from it. Google offers a good model here for how to do so.

It may not be quite as easy for larger, more traditional media providers to do this. They have sales staffs, Internet ad directors, and the like to pressure the publishers.

There needs to a clear separation of advertisements from news content. That’s fairly easy. I don’t doubt media companies can pull it off by separating and walling off the jobs in the ways they always have done. But they have to refigure out how to do this in an Internet age to better tap their ad dollar potential. Targeting ads has never been easier and thus the walls need to be all the more clear.

For little sites and niche news organizations with a small staff, though, Google is a natural way to do this. It’s a happy marriage. Why resent losing a percentage of ad dollars to a company that has helped make it all possible? Independence, no need for a large sales staff, ease of operations … it’s a symbiotic relationship from an editorial perspective.

Some issues, though, are common to sites of all sizes: How many pages does a reader have to browse through to quickly find the content they want? How much is ease of use and reducing the required number of clicks built into the site? Who should have responsibility over the user experience?

It’s this overall user experience, the ease of use, and the intrusion of ads into the browsing experience that worries me more. Are media companies trying to make their Web sites user friendly, or trading reader frustration for ad dollars?

To the extent that readers are frustrated, this policy will backfire when readers go to competitor sites. That is why the user experience is key.